Outdoor Holiday Portraits

When I was on exchange in Sweden, and later on the Europe tour, I had a photographic project in mind but I was limited by my gear and knowledge. That project is to come up with portraits of my friends that exceed snap-shot quality. The continuation of this project will be from May-June in China. In preparation, I have been brushing up my skills and techniques. This is a post that I have set as a tutorial question for myself. I hope it will be useful for most of my friends since many will go on holiday this summer.

To me, I rate most of my holiday portraits snap-shot quality. That is to say (this description will be very familiar to most of us), you and your friend(s) stand at a point and another friend/helpful stranger will take a picture. And, hopefully, the photo will contain a relatively large area of the very scenic background with less emphasis on the character(s) in the photo. Boring. I have been doing outdoor portrait research for the past year and I want to share some tips and techniques I gathered from the standpoint of outdoor/studio setup wedding portraits and celebrity portfolios. In particualar, I will be discussing photos in Asian context.

I think most of my gal friends wouldn't want to spend time with photos of Taiwanese female singers, especially those who supposedly "act-cute" like Jolin (蔡依林) and Cyndi (王心凌). To me their photos represent the trend of commercial photography and serve as creative sources. Why do I discuss portraits in Asian context? Because I find it easier to utilize the photographic techniques in Asian-idol portfolios than Western celebrity portfolios. In addition, I like Asian photographic style more than the Western one.

Let us reverse engineer a photo of 王心凌 and learn some techniques.This picture was taken in Tokyo and distributed as photo post-card in the album Cyndi With U.

  1. This is a nightshot portrait with flash, so turn to this mode on your camera. If you desire the effect of this photo, do not shoot with the flash only. You need the long exposure to capture the ambient light or the background will be dark.
  2. Stay still for a while longer after the flash. The long exposure requires you to be stationary or there will be streaking.
  3. A point about nightshots is try to take them when there's still some light in the sky. This is the period that lasts up to 60 min after sunset. Now, look at the sky in the picture above. There is still a tinge of blue in the sky and this is more interesting than a totally dark sky.
  4. The standard rule of the third. Cyndi divides the photo ~1/3 right of the frame.
  5. Choose a dramatic background. The tram in the background is a trivial subject but the extended exposure made it show as a slight blur; nice!
  6. The tilt of the frame is another element that makes this picture work.
  7. Posing tips. Gals, do not face the camera straight on. Turn your body away from the camera like what Cyndi is doing. It's more flattering since most of us appear slimmer in our side profile.
  8. Lighting-wise. Most probably a on-camera flash with light modifier by the absence of shadow on the face. Side lighting would have created very prominent shadow near the nose area.

posted byWilliam at 8:35 PM  

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